The Magic of Interpersonal Decentering: Perspective-taking Maturation in the Harry Potter Series.

In studies of children's reading, children who read more fiction showed increased scores on their theory of mind complexity tasks. Mature perspective-taking facilitates people's understanding of themselves and others by enabling them to anticipate other people's responses to their actions. The current study explored a hypothesized developmental feature of fiction content that might relate to theory of mind maturation observed in readers of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Since the seven-book series spans the main characters? transition from late childhood to late adolescence (approximately ages 11-18), the text content should reflect the characters? theory of mind/perspective-taking maturation from Piaget's concrete operational reasoning to mature formal operational cognition. Interpersonal decentering is a storytelling measure of perspective-taking based on Piaget's theory applied to social interaction. In the current design, interpersonal decentering was scored for 25 pages from each Potter book by trained, non-Potter-reading scorers. The hypothesis of a linear trend showing increased decentering maturation was supported at the page sequence level for books 2 through 7. These findings suggest that the compelling nature of Harry Potter lies in part in its trajectory of theory of mind maturation as well as its larger themes. These results may highlight elements of a compelling narrative that sharpen students? interpersonal skills and prosocial behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]